The Lower City is alive, and its people are reeling in the wake of Rown’s devastating attack. Its heart is a dark mirror of the living Towers above, and into it the Spire has poured its dark magic — and now pours its poison. As the wounded entity seethes, the Spire commands the evacuation of all of the earthbound residents, out into the walker-filled wastes with no shelter and no resources, or they will perish as it scourges the Lower City to put an end to the rival it has created. Right when her city needs her most, Xhea finds her magic bound, and she and Shai must find another way to save everyone and everything they know from the impending clash of titans.

Too often the third book in a trilogy tries to go high-concept, and the author doesn’t really know how to ramp things up to that scale, so it either falls kind of flat and just doesn’t feel anywhere near as colossal as its premise demands, or the pacing gives me whiplash as the author just seems to give up and wrap it in a messy bow as fast as possible. Karina Sumner-Smith once again subverts, if not my expectations — I know she’s damn talented at this point — then my concerns, and delivers a novel that I found to be the perfect balance between the epic and the intimate, with pacing that leaves no fat to be trimmed.

All of the loose threads are neatly woven in by the end, with nothing suffering short shrift. On the personal level, everything from Shai’s relationship with her mother and the way she lost her father, to the origins of Xhea’s abandonment complex, and even secondary characters such as Wen’s closure with his son, are given a fair resolution. Meanwhile the whole city, above and below, shakes itself apart and we get answers about what the dark magic really is and has meant for these people, the atrocities wrought by the Spire, and the true natures of the Towers’ hearts.

And of course, Xhea and Shai’s relationship. Because that’s the only word for it as the subtext of the second book builds into, well, text. There are no deep declarations of love — a quiet ‘Yours, then,’ a small joy amidst the desperation of their world ending around them, is the closest we’ll come — it’s chaste but gently romantic, and after the way they have grown as people, together, it feels very much earned. And it’s a sweetly melancholy thing, when you know there can be no living happily ever after for someone who is not alive.

Sumner-Smith’s prose is, as it has been throughout the trilogy, a clean and evocative experience you can sink into without becoming lost in flowery word choices that would detract from the often urgent tone. I haven’t read any of her short stories and I don’t know much about how prolific she is in that field, so she may well have been honing her skills on short fiction for years, but for a YA author bringing home her first trilogy, she stands out from the pack in technical ability.

I am genuinely surprised that these books aren’t more hyped. They’re a tour de force of so many elements that I often see YA readers lamenting the relative dearth of. I love YA, but in a field currently drowning in love triangles and lazy wish fulfilment for characterisation, I rarely find a YA series I can be so uncritical of. I’d happily buy the author’s next works sight unseen. I can’t imagine a return to this world after its immensely satisfying and complete conclusion, although it might be fun to see how Daye and Torrence became what they are, but hopefully she will deliver on a new premise with the same richness of character.